


Blackbird

by LauraEMoriarty



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Comfort/Angst, Existential Angst, F/M, Friendship/Love, Post-Reaper War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-23
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-06-03 22:25:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6629194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LauraEMoriarty/pseuds/LauraEMoriarty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James Vega tracks down his former Commander some years after the end of the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blackbird

Blackbird singing in the dead of night ****  
Take these broken wings and learn to fly ****  
All your life ****  
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night ****  
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see ****  
All your life ****  
You were only waiting for this moment to be free

 

 _\- Blackbird,_ The Beatles

Painting the inside of a cottage on Earth came close to her idea of a good time.  Shona Shepard wiped her brow with her sleeve, pushing errant strands of copper hair off her forehead as she did so. The blizzard outside the double glazed windows coated everything in snow. The fire in the grate blazed merrily, yet she was still cold. What the hell had possessed her to buy a cottage in a remote part of one of the most inhospitable places on Earth? She didn’t know the answer, yet she was sure she had to have been mad to do so, absolutely insane. If anything, it really was the perfect ending to her career in the Alliance Navy, the end of her tenure as a Spectre.

 

Since the end of the war, Shona had avoided all contact with the Alliance, all contact with the council. She had found a piece of land that was quiet, solitary, and content to live out the rest of her days as a hermit, she had abandoned everyone and everything. She dipped the paintbrush into the tray and paused, hand on hip as she considered the splotchy carpet as the paint dripped off her paintbrush. Shona planned on ripping out the carpet—it was just a collector of dust and she hated the stuff.  Shrugging, she wiped the excess paint off the end of her brush, and started the third wall of her little cottage.  It had been the size of the place that attracted her when she had seen it two days after she left the Alliance, and she’d bought it on a whim, in the middle of summer.

 

It had been a gorgeous summer day, the fresh fields of clover and daisies appealing to her sense of whimsy. The whitewashed cottage with its thatched roof and rambling garden and acreage, a horse or three and some goats in a field behind the cottage, a barn behind, had been just what Shona had sought. Somewhere to retire from war and conflict. Alone, no contact with the outside world, no extranet connections, no way of being found unless people some twenty miles south of her decided to blab that Shona Shepard, the infamous _commander_ in the Alliance lived there. She had bought their silence with generous donations to the town, building new roads, a new school and hospital, on the condition that they never reveal that it had been her that had been the benefactor. She’d been lucky that so far, they’d kept their side of the bargain, but Shona knew sooner or later that someone would betray her.

 

She reached the wall she’d been painting, and wiping the brush in generous, wide strokes, she painted the next part of her mural. It was her house, hers to do what she pleased with—and murals instead of traditional blank walls appealed to her. The grey tabby cat that she’d inherited with the cottage and land had watched her painting, silently judging her art with a flick of the tail and the occasional help in the form of an overturned bucket of paint.

 

“Get away from there, puss,” Shona said, her voice rusty from disuse. The cat stared at her, her long tail swishing angrily as Shona put her paintbrush down, and made to move the cat onto the single chair in the room. A dark green suede wing-backed armchair sat in the corner, where the remains of Shona’s latest abandoned project sat in open defiance of the orderliness of the room. “C’mon Lucy Maude,” she addressed her cat, picking her up and cradling her in one arm, she petted the grey tabby behind the ears.

 

Outside, the wind howled, and Shona thought she could hear the howling of wolves on the wind. She moved the cat to the stretcher that served as her bed in the other corner of the room. A patchwork quilt, made by her, covered a mess of blankets and sheets, a pillow as hard and thin as the carpet beneath her feet. Shona didn’t feel like she deserved a proper bed, not when she had sent more people into the afterlife than she’d saved—it was her way of doing penance—far better a hard bed and pillow than the shallow graves she’d condemned so many people to lie in during the Reaper War.

 

One of the myriad reasons Shona had disappeared after the war was that she felt she hadn’t deserved to live, and this was her penitence and punishment. She had exiled herself, isolated herself from everyone and everything. Her extranet address had been deactivated, all communication channels cut off. Losing Kaidan and David had broken her will to live, broken the spark that told her to hang on. When they’d pulled her from the rubble of wherever she had come down, Shona had fought tooth and nail against letting herself live—the guilt was far too great to live with. Yet her life had been spared—why?

 

Dropping Lucy Maude onto the bed, Shona walked through to the kitchen, a tiny room barely large enough for the wood stove that threw enough heat to warm the tiny cottage. She pulled the thin cardigan back around her shoulders as she reached up to get the large, chipped and broken water tank that passed as a tea cup. She reached up again for the teabags, pulling out the tea chest with its diverse offerings, rifling through the selection until she found the peppermint tea. Taking the tea bag from the chest, she replaced the box on the shelf above the fuel stove.

 

She heard the howling of the wind outside, and the banging of the barn door that blew open and shut in the fierce blizzard. Each deafening bang ricocheted against her eardrums, like the sound of Reapers that haunted her in her dreams. Shona reached down under the sink next, her hand searching the cavity until she found the pouch that she’d stashed there. Taking a pinch of tobacco, and a cigarette paper, she rolled a cigarette, a menthol filter in the end, and lit it, inhaling the menthol and tobacco with a sigh. They were a rare, once-in-a-blue-moon treat to herself, knowing that they’d eventually kill her. She gave a mental shrug.

 

Fuck that. She’d died once before, over Alchera, a cold and frozen planet not unlike the landscape outside. Shona heard the banging of the barn door again, but it sounded closer than the barn, as though the wind was blowing her front door open and shut loudly. Glancing out of the window, she could see a light moving in her direction, as if someone was out there, the light cutting through the dark. She stood on her tiptoes to reach on top of the fridge to where she kept her Crusader shotgun loaded, and pulled it down. The familiar N7 logo caught her eye as she dusted it off, and walked cautiously to the door, her cigarette dangling loosely between her lips.

 

“How the fuck did you find me?” Her voice sounded harsh and rough as she squinted out into the dark, the smoke curling up around her head as the figure came through the howling gale.

 

A tall, solid man stood not two metres from her front door, evidently having decided that she wasn’t going to answer, and had turned to leave. His torch still in one hand, the other shoved in his pocket, turning away to start the long trek back to Resolute, Nunavut.

 

“What? That’s how you greet me? I’m almost insulted, Lola.” The bulky figure moved into the light cast by the open door. He wore a heavy pair of boots, his face covered by a balaclava, but Shona knew that voice anywhere.

 

“Get the fuck off my place,” she growled, the cigarette smoke making her more dragon-like than ever. “I’ve told Hackett a thousand times that I’m not interested. I left that life behind for a good reason.”

 

“That’s not why I’m here, Shona,” James said—and the use of her first name shocked her long enough that she stood back, the hand holding the shotgun dropping to her side as she wordlessly let James past her into the house.

 

“Why are you here, then? Can’t be for my winning personality and sparkling company.” Her tone, blunt and rough, betrayed the hint of a smile in her words. She’d always had a soft spot for James—not that she’d ever tell anyone.

 

“Can’t a man just come visit a friend without being assigned ulterior motives?” James replied, and paused as he took in the room he had stepped into, turning his torch off. “Really love what you’ve done with the place.”

 

“Cut the shit, Vega. You didn’t track me down just to compliment my interior design choices.” Shona felt the smile tugging at her lips. It took all her willpower not to grin at him. She took the cigarette out of her mouth and flicked it into the fire. “Why are you here?” she asked again, dropping into the chair where she had left a hand-sewing project in. She yelped as her posterior came into contact with the sharp ends of several pins, and sprang back up.

 

Damn James Vega for making her forget herself. He’d always had the ability—or in Shona’s opinion—curse, of being able to make her smile when nobody else could. Something about him appealed to her, though she’d be hard pressed to know what it was.

 

James pulled his gloves off and reached into his thick coat to draw out a box. “Alliance wanted me to give you this.”

 

Shona felt her heart sink at the sight of the box. She knew damn well that it was another Star of Terra, like the one they’d given her for the clusterfuck that’d been the Skyllian Blitz, and the one they’d tried to pin to her chest in the aftermath of the Reaper War. “If that’s a Star of Terra, you can keep it,” she told him, crossing her arms against her chest and turning away from James.

 

James laughed. “Always suspicious, Shona,” he said, opening the thin, flat box to show her the holosphere that sat nestled in the velvet lined box. “It was found among Anderson’s possessions, with the note that it should go to you if he ever died.”

 

Shona took the box with clumsy fingers, cradling the tiny sphere in her hands. If this was what she thought it was—“Is this what I think it is?”

 

James shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine, Lola,” he said, half-amused by the sudden interest Shona had shown in the box.

 

“It’s a message to me in the event of his death,” Shona said softly. “I can’t—James. I can’t view this.” She swallowed, the sudden lump in her throat making it hard to breathe, and she felt the prick of tears behind her eyes. “I couldn’t save him, and he was the closest thing I had to a father.”

 

“Maybe that’s why you need to view it,” James said quietly, all trace of joking gone. He looked down at Shona, and she glanced up at him, trying hard not to betray the emotion she had discovered she could still feel.

 

Shona blinked back the tears that threatened to spill. “I don’t want to,” she said, but she opened up the old cabinet behind her, and pulled out a battered omnitool anyway. She popped the holosphere into the omnitool, and suddenly the face of David Anderson loomed large in the room, a friendly ghost.

 

“Shepard. You know, I’ve never seen the point of recording things for viewing after death, and yet here I am making one of these silly vids,” David’s voice spoke, his tough and weathered face a comforting sight. “Here we go. You can’t blame yourself for my death—I know I’ll go down bloody. The fate of a soldier is to get shot at until you fall, and then they patch you up again and again, sending you on all sorts of missions that you think pointless. It’s a far cry from the days when we fought turians—never imagined we’d end up on the same side of a war. But you already know all this stuff—we’ve been over it before. Forgive the ramblings of an old soldier,” Anderson’s visage gave a wry little chuckle, like Shona had seen him do so many times in life.

 

“Get over yourself, I know you’ve probably exiled yourself to some remote spot, probably somewhere really unhospitable because you think you’re responsible for my death, but truth is, I never planned to—“ Shona shut the recording off, her face stony.

 

“He knew me so well,” she muttered, searching the small room for her cup of tea that she’d been making when James so rudely interrupted her. “But why tell me that it wasn’t my fault? It _was_ my fault he died. It was my fault that everyone around me was dead. I went up into that beam, James, intending on never coming back. I was supposed to die. Not him.”

 

She felt her shoulders shaking, the emotion she’d held back for the last five years came flooding out of her. James crossed the room in two strides and gathered her against him, and Shona didn’t resist. She felt the tears coursing down her cheeks, and the soundless sobs as she found herself being cradled in James’s arms, collapsing on the hearth before the fire. He held her for a long time, letting Shona cry out all the tears she had refused to shed, the tears she’d told herself were for later, when she could finally cry without having to be the façade she’d so successfully presented to the galaxy during the war.

 

“The war took so much out of me, James,” she said hours later, when she had calmed down enough to speak. “David’s death, the death of the man who found me on Mindoir as a frightened sixteen year old who had just witnessed the brutal murder of her father, and the rape and murder of her mother and was about to share her mother’s fate, was the final nail in the coffin.” She shook her head, looking up at James from where they sat on the floor, warming themselves in front of the fire.

 

“It broke me, James. It broke me in a way that not even Ash’s death or Kaidan’s death, or any other death during the war could. I’d always held onto the vain hope that if David got through this war, I could get through it too. When I went into the beam, I went, never intending to come back alive.” The words came easily now, the freedom of unburdening herself on James felt good, right. “I was broken, destroyed—take your pick of words,” she continued, “but I’ve somehow survived everything that’s been thrown at me. I’ve given my pound of flesh and more.”

 

“I never knew that.” James said, squeezing her hand gently, “Shona, I’ve got nothing but admiration for you, always have, always will. Nothing can change what happened to you, but I have a story to tell you, if you’re willing to hear it.”

 

Shona tilted her head to the side, studying James’s hands. She had always believed that someone’s hands were as telling as someone’s face when it came to reading their lives. She turned his hand over, so that she had a clear view of his palm, and the lines on it. She saw the strong, square palm that had gripped guns and training bars, but also been the strength that had held Ann Bryson as she let Leviathan talk through her. She saw too, the compassion in the way his hand laid open—Shona saw clearly the life line, a twisting line that ran off his palm and joined the lines on his wrist.

 

“Why’d you really  come?” Shona asked, curiosity getting the better of her. “They could’ve sent the holosphere by courier, I do get the occasional bit of mail—I toss it in the fire. Makes for great kindling.” A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, and she stood abruptly, noticing the log in the grate falling apart as the flames engulfed it. She bent down to pick up a large pine log from the box beside the fire, and stuffed it into the heater. The flames licked the rough bark, catching it instantly.

 

“We want you back. The _Normandy_ isn’t  the same without you there.” James said.

 

“Cut the fucking shit, James. I know they miss me, but  I’m done. I’m _so_ done with the Alliance, so done with being the whipping girl and then their poster girl for their recruits. Their attempts to woo me back haven’t worked yet, and they won’t work ever.” Shona’s voice sounded cold, even to her. “They said they wouldn’t hassle me after the last time they failed.”

 

“Why do you think I’ve been sent by the Alliance?” James asked, puzzled.

 

“Why else would they spend the time and energy to track me down if not for that reason?” Shona answered James’s question with one of her own. She held up a hand to silence the words that she knew he’d say next. “Don’t lie to me, James. I’ve had a gutful.”

 

He looked hurt, Shona thought, but she had been lied to enough times in her life to know when she was in the presence of liars. The Alliance brass had lied to her, her mother had lied to her, her father, the Council, everyone had lied to her about what her purpose was. Expendable—that was what she was, and she knew it. They had dressed their lies up in flattery and praise—words she had once craved hearing, but with the benefit of hindsight, she knew she’d only ever been a tool to be used.

 

“I was used. Never thanked or acknowledged, never given any help, only more work and more impossible tasks,” she continued, the anger in her voice tight and controlled. “I lost everything I ever held dear to me, and there was no acknowledgement of what I lost, what terrible price I paid for being their tool.” She disentangled herself from James and stood, walking back into the small kitchen to get another cup of tea.

 

In the safety of the kitchen, Shona sighed. She hadn’t meant to unburden herself, she’d meant to never say any of the things she’d told James. She’d vowed she’d never say anything to anyone about how she’d felt. They’d once called her the Hero of the Skyllian Blitz, the Conqueror of Collectors, but those titles felt hollow, the first Human Spectre. Shona hated each and every one of those titles they bestowed on her, ignoring the damage those titles did to her already precarious state of mind. They never saw the damage it did, the way that every title they bestowed on her chipped the humanity out of her, steady chip by chip like a chisel in the hands of an expert sculptor. They sounded hollow, all the grand titles the public bestowed on her.

 

The titles ignored the pain that lingered, the ghosts that were only ghosts because of her poor decisions. The graveyard of millions of souls scattered across the galaxy were down to her, and she had repaid them by running away from the guilt that ate at her. She’d run like the coward she had always known she was. She’d disappeared from life, from the public that had wanted nothing more than to adore her, and she felt like a fraud.

 

Returning to the living room, two steaming cups of tea in her hands, she wordlessly handed one of the cups to James. She might’ve been a hermit—a Timon of Athens—but she remembered her manners sometimes.  “Here you go. It’s the only tea I have in the house,” she explained, settling down on the floor next  to him, her anger forgotten for a moment. James didn’t deserve the anger she felt towards the galaxy—he’d done nothing to deserve it.  “I’m sorry, James. You don’t deserve the anger I feel and the disgust.”

 

He took the cup from Shona, and she watched him, when the flames from the fire cast half his face in shadow. He hadn’t changed much, physically—but Shona knew there were scars, physical and mental ones, that could never be erased. There were new scars too, that she saw on his face—a scar that cleaved his left eyebrow in two, raised and angry-looking that hadn’t been there before. Another new scar snaked down the side of his right cheek, presumably from an omniblade.

 

“You’re a bit more scarred than I remember you being,” she observed quietly, and made a move as though to touch them, but remembered herself quickly and her hand dropped back down onto her lap.

 

“So are you,” James said, sipping his steaming mug of peppermint tea. She watched as he took in the small confines of the room they sat in, his gaze searching for something she couldn’t see. He took another sip of his tea as he continued gazing around the room, Shona still observing and following his gaze until she saw what he saw. A model of the _SSV Normandy SR-1_ that sat on a shelf in the corner, the only hint that Shona had ever been a soldier, let alone a member of the Alliance Navy.

 

“What happened to you, Shona?” James asked, “After the war, I mean.”

 

She let out a sharp breath she’d not realised she was holding in, and looked James square in the eye. “Survivor’s guilt,” she said succinctly. “And self-loathing.”

 

“The nightmares are the worst part of it, aren’t they, Lola?” James said, knowingly. In his tone, she could hear the sound of a fellow soldier going through the same thing she was. Survivor’s guilt, the terrible burden of living while far worthier people were dispatched to the afterlife and the washer at the ford to greet them on their journey to the other side.

The nightmares weren’t the only thing eating at Shona. Nor was the survivor’s guilt. She’d survived in the past by compartmentalising, but compartmentalisation no longer worked. She’d seen too much death to be able to push it out of her brain, and some nights she woke screaming, crying out to the great void to save someone, to take her instead. The dreams haunted her as they had done during the war, but they were worse now.

 

“The worst part isn’t that they exist, it’s the way we wake up from them, hearts racing, bolt upright from deep sleep to sudden and shocking awareness. You know that the next time you close your eyes, you’ll return to them,” Shona said quietly, putting her mug on the floor beside her and  drawing her knees up to her chest, resting her chin on her sharp knees. She tilted her head and squinted out at the unchanging darkness outside. “The thoughts that flood through your head every time you wake up are the worst, cause the dreams feel so real, like you’re back there, having to make the decisions over and over again.” A bitter chuckle left her lips, “It’s a real mindfuck.”

 

She watched as James’s face changed momentarily.

 

“It’s worse when it’s the same thing over and over,” he said, “I’m forever running, carrying Captain Toni on my shoulders towards the retreat position, and he’s screaming in pain cause his leg’s been shattered, and the Blood Pack strike with a missile that narrowly misses us, throwing me and the captain to the ground. I keep seeing his face white with pain as the fucking Blood Pack attempts to blow us right into the air.”

 

Shona watched him grip his tea cup with both hands, knowing the effort it took to stop them from shaking, knowing from her own hands shaking just as badly. She reached for her own mug of tea, and found hers shaking too, a psychosomatic shake that seemed more in sympathy with James’s. She stopped herself from taking her cup, and instead reached across the space between them to grasp his shaking hand, and steady it.

 

“It’s all right, James,” she told him in the same voice she used when calming terrified maiden does going into labour for the first time. Calm and steady, she continued, “I’m here. I won’t be going anywhere, c’mon, that’s it,” she squeezed his hand knowingly, encouragingly. It took all her self-control not to reach out and stroke his head like she’d do a goat’s, knowing it was far too intimate a gesture.

 

“I’ve never really told anyone about the nightmare, Shona,” James said quietly. He returned the squeeze, and Shona saw the look in his eye. It said so much more than words could adequately express.

The rest of the evening passed with them sharing secrets, baring their souls for the first time since the war had ended. A bond formed between the two broken soldiers that nothing could slice through, an understanding that they faced the same demons and their self-loathing. Shona, though only having one bed and one set of sheets, carefully moved the sleeping cat off her wing back chair, preparing to settle herself in it for a night of sleep.

 

As she came out of the bedroom that lacked a bed, clad in the heavy wool nightie she always wore in winter, socks on her feet and a beanie on her head. She carried a heavy blanket that smelled not of mothballs, but instead of orange oil, sweet and floral. She’d always found the sweet scent of orange oil calming, and the weight of the wool blanket spoke of safety and security to her. “You can sleep on the bed,” she told James, “I’ll take the chair.”

 

She saw a glimmer of amusement in her friend’s eyes at the words. He gave a little chuckle.

 

“I’m pretty sure it’s meant to be the other way around, Lola,” James said, taking the blanket from her and draping it over the end of the bed.

 

“You’re the guest here, James. Take the bed.” Settling herself in the chair, she closed her eyes and let Morpheus guide her into his realm.

 

Some hours later, Shona woke to the sound of screaming. It took her a few moments to realise where it came from, and when she did, she moved through the room to where James was trapped in his endless nightmare. Settling herself down on the side of the bed, Shona shook him gently. His hand gripped her wrist in a painful, powerful grip that Shona thought would break her wrist. James bolted upright, eyes fuzzy and wide, Shona seeing the confusion in them.

 

“It was only a nightmare,” she told him, using the same tone she had used earlier. “You’re safe, James.”

 

“Shona?” James said, as though surprised to see her there.

 

She waited until his breathing returned to normal before speaking again. “Are you ok?”

 

“I think so,” James replied, and Shona smiled encouragingly at him.

 

“Would it help if I stayed on the stretcher?” she asked, “Human contact, I’ve found, is often good after a nightmare.” She didn’t add the unspoken words between them that said she’d been in the same nightmare again. They understood the nature of the dreams, and the need for comfort.

 

James nodded his consent, and Shona felt his arms wrap around her small frame. “Thank you Shona,” he said, kissing the top of her head.

 

Falling asleep with James wrapped around her felt peaceful. The two of them could hopefully weather whatever came next. “James?” Shona muttered sleepily, “This feels nice.”

 

“It does,” James agreed, shifting slightly to drape his leg over the side of the absurdly small cot. “Shona, how the hell you sleep on this thing is beyond me.”

 

“Shut up and sleep,” she muttered, trying to roll over as they pulled the pile of blankets up over them, the heavy wool warm and soft. “I manage fine.”

 

“Yeah, but this thing wasn’t built for two people, Lola,” James mumbled sleepily, pulling her closer still. If he pulled Shona any closer, she’d be pretty much on top of him.

 

It felt somewhat strange to drift off to sleep in James’s arms, but it was the good kind of strange—the strangeness of sharing a bed where she had denied herself that comfort, the hard, Spartan room a comfortable and acceptable place to fall into when sleep  finally claimed her. She’d never had what she’d call a comfortable life—the life she’d lived on Mindoir could hardly be called comfortable. It had been subsistence farming, growing only what they needed with little to spare—her parents had never been rich, and Shona had grown up in almost poverty, but she had a warm bed at night and a roof over her head, and food on the table. In hindsight, Shona realised that she’d been pretty damn lucky in that regard.


End file.
